Data Quality Engineering in Financial Services

Preface

Most people would say we live in a world where we trust in the manufacturing discipline and quality standards used to provide the food we eat, the water we drink, the medications we take, and the sophisticated technology products we use in our daily lives. We can appreciate the years of evolution in science, refinement in manufacturing techniques, and codification of product specifications that form the basis of the trust we enjoy in consuming and using physical products today. Given the monumental achievements in science, technology, and manufacturing; what then is so different about the data used in the financial industry whereby data and information must be constantly checked, rechecked, and reconciled to ensure its accuracy and quality?

Data is the fundamental raw material used in the financial industry to manage your retirement and family’s wealth assets, provide operating and growth capital to companies, and drive the global financial system as the life blood of the global economy. Unlike the manufacturing industry, data flows in the financial industry have evolved from being based on open outcry, telephone, paper trails, and ticker tapes, to being grounded in sophisticated and complex computational, artificial intelligence, and machine learning applications. We capture, store, and pass along data through complex applications, and we use data in business processes with a general assumption that the data is reliable and suitable for use.

However, data has no physical ...